Office is a very important product for Microsoft and the company doesn't plan to abandon the desktop version anytime soon.

These new desktop versions are touch optimized and will end up as part future Office 365 releases, so you will need some kind of subscription for it. We have mentioned that Windows 10 Preview from January just got Word, Excel and PowerPoint Previews. They are available for your testing pleasure under Windows 10.

Desktop / Notebook lovers and people who actually want and need to write essays, articles, reports, will want the real thing, and the next office for desktop iteration is called Office 2016.

Microsoft has officially confirmed that the new version is to be expected in the second half of 2016 and that the beta should come out soon. The second half of 2016 is the general availability date.

Office 2016 is optimized for standard keyboard and mouse input on your desktop and notebook, but Microsoft didn’t talk about touch input.

Office 2013 was an all-connected office package, and supported could storage and sharing. We are sure that 2016 will continue down that path. It will be interesting to learn if you will need an Office 365 license to work on your office files on tablets and phones in case you own Office 2016.

Microsoft mentioned a new version of Office during its January Windows 10 update event and now it has shown what the new Office applications look like.

Redmond promised that they will be touchscreen friendly and work better with the continuum mode. We tried the latest Preview Release of WIndows 10 last week and we beleive that people who like Windows 7 will like the new Windows 10.

Microsoft has three apps ready for your trial experience - Word Preview, Excel Preview and PowerPoint Preview. You can download them from the Windows 10 store and combined they all weight just around 220 MB and don’t take too long to install.

The whole suite will be called Office for Windows 10, no surprise there. The general idea is to make this version of Office work well on small devices like tablets, but to scale to notebooks, desktops, all the way to the 84-inch Microsoft Surface Hub.

Office for Windows 10 includes touch-optimized versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Outlook. In this early preview we got the taste of the tree popular ones - Word, Excel and PowerPoint. We are sure that Outlook and OneNote Preview versions will follow shortly.

We took a moment and tried Word, an application that we've used for many years now and the new iteration has an e-reader button that lets you read your document without all those unnecessary menu settings.

You can drag and drop picture in your text, we didn’t try it but we hope it works better than with previous versions of Word, which were notorious for messing up formatting when graphics were added. Word for Windows 10 should be great for collaboration and review of mark-up documents. There is a new Insights for office feature (powered by Bing) in Read mode brings additional online resources like images, web references and definitions right to you in your reading experience.

Excel for Windows 10 promises great touch-first controls, that "shine in Excel, you won’t even miss your keyboard and mouse when selecting ranges of cells, formatting your pie charts or managing your workbooks."

We will see, but one of the current obstacles is that you cannot try any of these apps right now on Windows Phone, as there is still no Windows 10 for phones. We are not sure if you can install this Preview release of Windows 10 on tablets as we don’t have one handy to try.

PowerPoint for Windows 10, OneNote for Windows 10, Outlook Mail and Outlook Calendar for Windows 10 will come at later date, promising great experience.

If you have the Windows 10 preview release you can hit the store and download Word, Excel and PowerPoint for free and take them for a spin.

While Apple iOS users have been enjoying Microsoft Office for quite some time, the Android version of the Office suite has been limited to preview program users. As of today, Microsoft Office for Android for tablets is available to all users.

The list of software includes Android tablet versions of Word, Excel and Powerpoint. Although these are free for download, which will allow users to log in with their Microsoft account, create, edit and print files, some advanced features will be limited to Office 365 subscribers. Microsoft needed the preview program in order to get its Office apps to support a vast choice of devices.

Microsoft Office apps have been available for both iPad and iPhone as of last year and, according to Microsoft, have seen more than 80 million downloads.

While it did officially launch Office for Android tablets, or precisely, pulled it from its preview state, it still does not have support for Intel SoCs, which should be coming "within a quarter" or essentially later this year.

Microsoft is already working on the new Office 2016 for desktop which will also include a universal app for smartphones and small tablets that will come with Windows 10, so this new Android version of Office might not last long.

In addition to the new Office for Android tablet, Microsoft also unveiled the new Outlook app for both iOS and Android devices.

There has been an interesting development. Microsoft Office is still the most dominant office application suite on the planet and now it is available on Windows, Mac OS and even iOS. There have been rumours that Office will soon come to Android and with time it could spread to even more platforms, including Chrome OS.

Despite the fact that Microsoft has its One cloud, the company has announced that you can now access, edit and share office files with your Dropbox account. This is a huge and positive deal for both companies. Microsoft has acknowledge that it cannot simply ignore the most popular personal cloud application and that it has to offer Office functionality to Dropbox users and make the life of many non-computer geeks much easier. Microsoft will continue to work hard on promotion of its competing option called the One drive (artist previously known as Prince – or Sky Drive. Ed.)

One drive is here to stay but we are quite sure it won't be as popular as Dropbox. In any case it is nice to have an alternative and great that it offers even more free space. There is Google Drive, Box and a range of other applications that will offer you some free storage but in reality normal people end up using one or two.

For the most users, Dropbox or Google Drive will be enough.

This is the official Dropbox changelog:

Edit Office files from the Dropbox mobile app and sync changes across devices. Create a file at home and finish it on the go — any edits will automatically save to your Dropbox.

Access Dropbox files from the Office app and save new files to Dropbox. You can now sync your docs and keep them safe without leaving the Office app.

Share Dropbox links from Office. When you’ve finished making changes to your document, you can instantly share it by sending a Dropbox link to colleagues or friends.

Microsoft is hosting a media event on March 27th that is said to be focused on mobile and the cloud. The latest media event seems to make perfect sense at the time for Microsoft to finally get out of the way of itself and introduce Office for iPad.

Codenamed “Miramar”, Office for iPad has been rumored for a long time. It is believed that Microsoft will move forward with the iPad Office offer which will include Word, Powerpoint, Excel, and OneNote. It will not include Outlook in the iPad offering, but it is believed that codename “Gemini” which is the Microsoft Touch version of Office will include some sort of an Email client akin to Outlook for the Microsoft platforms.

Previously, it was thought that Microsoft was holding on to releasing the iPad version because it wanted to get its enhanced version for tablets out first. Now it seems that the ability to drive revenue and put up a stand agaist other products that are eating into Office’s market share seem to be the driving factor.

How the Apple version will be sold is believed to be through the Apple App Store and then it might perhaps use a link to Office 365 subscription as part of the purchase process. It does remain to be seen just how well Office might do on the iPad platform, but many Enterprise customers would welcome the addition of office to the iPads that they are already deploying within their Enterprise.

Microsoft could be looking to move ahead with the release of Office for iPad even though it has not released a touch enabled version for Windows 8 yet.

The roll out of Office for iPad could come as soon as later this year. It seems that the iPad version of Office is far ahead of the Windows 8 touch version as far as the actual development goes. So rumors that the iPad version of Office is dead seem to again be unfounded.

What we still don’t know is how Microsoft intends to charge for the iPad version. Will it be reasonably priced?

A zero-day vulnerability, which was discovered that exploits a Microsoft graphics component using malicious Word documents, appears to be attacking Indian and Pakistan targets.

FireEye’s Research team has analysed this zero-day exploit and found a connection between these attacks and earlier attacks in India and Pakistan. Information obtained from a command-and-control server (CnC) used in recent attacks indicateds that the Hangover group, believed to operate from India, has compromised 78 computers, 47 percent of those in Pakistan.

FireEye has also found that another group also has access to this exploit and is using it to deliver the Citadel Trojan malware. This group, which we call the Arx group, may have had access to the exploit before the Hangover group did. Information obtained from CnCs operated by the Ark group revealed that 619 targets have been compromised. The majority of the targets are in India (63 percent) and Pakistan (19 percent).

This seems to indicate that use of this zero-day exploit is more widespread than previously believed and two different groups are using this exploit: Hangover and Ark. Hangover has been previously connected with a targeted malware campaign, and the Ark group is operating a Citadel-based botnet for organised crime.

Software giant Microsoft is seriously considering creating a version of Office which can run on Linux. According to ExtremeTech, Microsoft is taking a “meaningful look” at releasing a full Linux port of Office in 2014.

Rumours of the Linux version of Office surfaced last weekend at FOSDEM, the open source conference held annually in Brussels. It is all being prompted by Microsoft’s late realisation that Linux may be a viable commercial opportunity after all. Redmond has been developping a version of Office for Android to work on mobile devices. Since Android is Linux-based a lot of the porting work will have already been done. This means that it should not take too much effort to take the next step and bring Office to Linux.

There is no proof of this of course; it is just rumour and speculation. In the past, Microsoft has been worried about letting its crown jewels work on other operating systems. However if it is going to port to Android it might as well go the whole hog.

Rumors of a version of Microsoft Office app for iOS are now gaining more momentum as sources are confirming that Microsoft intends an early 2013 release. Rumors of a Microsoft Office Mobile app for iOS have been flying around as popularity of the iPhone and iPad continues to grow, but only now the actual details are starting to come to light.

The Microsoft Office app for iOS will apparently be free for viewing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents that are created with versions of Microsoft Office for Windows and Mac. Editing these documents on the iOS platform is apparently, however, going to cost.

Sources tell us that Office Mobile will require a subscription to Office 365 if you want to edit documents or create documents on your iPad or iPhone. The Office Mobile app will require a Microsoft Office account, even if all you want to do is take advantage of the free viewing functionality.

As far as functionality, sources claim that Microsoft isn’t intending for Office Mobile to be a fully functional Office on-the-go replacement, but instead with the subscription it will offer “basic editing” functionality. Microsoft is also said to be working on an Outlook app for iOS that is rumored to be called “OWA Mobile Client for iOS.” It will apparently offer Exchange 2012 compatibility as well as Lync support. It will, however, be separate from the Office Mobile product and it is unknown if Microsoft intends to market it; though rumors suggest it could be an attempt to offer an Enterprise solution that would work similarly to Good for iOS.

As for Android owners, Microsoft is working on a version of Office Mobile for the Android OS-based products, as well, but that is apparently a farther down the line. A number of sources are suggesting that we will likely see the iOS version arrive as soon as March 2013.

Continued rumors of Microsoft office for both iOS and Android tablets is getting some new life from our sources that say Microsoft is planning to release versions for both platforms. According to the latest we are hearing, we should look for it to arrive in the spring of 2013 in the month of March if everything stays on track.

The latest info suggests that when Office arrives for iOS and Android platforms it will include Excel, PowerPoint, and Word as the core applications. Microsoft, however, has denied that it has a plan for Microsoft Office applications for the iOS and Android mobile platforms. They have suggested that the information isn’t accurate and they have nothing to announce at this time.

We will have to see what happens next; but we have to think that with some of the other recent announcements by Microsoft as of late, it would seem they stand to make a fair chunk of money by releasing it for other platforms rather than keeping it a Microsoft Windows platform exclusive.